Eligibility Appeals Policy

Our Appeals Policy has recently changed so please read it carefully, even if you have used it before.

This appeals policy is for people who have applied to Help Musicians or Music Minds Matter for any service or support.

We also have a Complaint Policy if you’re not happy with how you were treated during the application process, or if you feel you weren‘t adequately supported during the process.

If you request an appeal but we believe your concerns are better covered by our Complaint Policy, we will explain this to you and set out what steps we will take under that Policy to respond to your feedback.

We want to ensure that you feel your circumstances have been fairly considered and so we provide a right of appeal around our eligibility decisions: this means that if we have said we don’t believe you meet our published eligibility criteria at the time you applied, and you believe we have made an error, you can ask for a second opinion.

If your appeal is not suitable for our process, we will still carefully consider the points you have raised, and we will explain to you why your appeal will not be progressed under this policy.

Help Musicians provides health, financial and career development support for musicians under our charitable purposes to prevent and relieve financial hardship and poverty amongst professional musicians. It is a legal requirement that we provide support in line with these purposes. To ensure that we do, we focus our support on musicians who rely on music income for their living and who are therefore at risk of hardship if that income falls or stops.

Our supporters donate to our charity because they believe in these purposes and to maintain their trust and generosity, we must use their funds to deliver maximum charitable impact and as they would reasonably expect us to.

Like arts funders, we care deeply about musicians and the music they create, however, unlike arts funders who may focus primarily on musicians’ creativity, as a charity focussed on addressing musicians’ financial hardship, we consider financial need and music career first and foremost.

We update our eligibility criteria periodically and keep it published on our website. We aim to ensure it reflects the reality of musicians’ working lives at the time and it is based on data about musicians’ income and support needs. At times of high demand, we may make eligibility restrictions tighter so that we can prioritise support for musicians who rely on music for their income.

Outside of our open access support such as online training we cannot provide charitable support to musicians who don’t fit our published eligibility at the time that they apply.

However, if you are not eligible at one time, it doesn’t prevent you from applying to us if your circumstances change in future. The most common reason we decline eligibly is because a musician cannot demonstrate they are making a living from music, as defined at the time in our published eligibility criteria. If your music work changes, you can always apply in future.

If we have stated that following assessment that we do not believe you meet our published eligibility criteria at this time, and you believe we have not correctly considered your responses or evidence, you can follow the process below:

How to make an appeal

You can only appeal an eligibility decision after you have received an email from us confirming that we believe you do not meet our eligibility criteria at this time.

If you wish to make an appeal, please do so within 5 weeks of the date we sent the email to you. If you ask to appeal after more than 5 weeks, we may ask you to re-apply rather than follow the appeal process.

To make an appeal: 

Check the current published eligibility criteria on our website. We can only provide support to musicians who meet these criteria. If after checking this, you still believe you do meet our eligibility criteria:

• Forward the email where we have state we don’t believe you are eligible at this time to appeals@​helpmusicians.​org.​uk or send a new email to that address making sure you include the name and email you made your application with, and the application number if known
• A brief explanation of the reason for your appeal and any extra information you think we should consider when assessing your eligibility. Please make sure you refer to our published eligibility criteria, as we cannot consider requests for support from musicians who don’t meet our eligibility criteria

What happens next

We will confirm we have received your appeal within two working days.

It will be passed to our Appeals Lead for review. They will send you an update within 10 working days.

The possible outcomes are:

• Eligible (appeal upheld): we will confirm you are eligible to apply for our support as a result of a second review
• Still not eligible (appeal not upheld): we will confirm we believe that our original eligibility decision is still correct, however you can apply again in future if your circumstances change
• More information needed: we may ask to organise a phone call or online meeting with you or ask for more information over email

We have a small team and sometimes if we are dealing with high demand for support appeals may take more than 10 working days to review. If this is the case, we will email you and update you.

Appeal decisions are final and there is no process to request a further review — we want to support as many musicians as possible and believe reviewing eligibility twice is fair for the individual musician while allowing us to ensure the capacity to support other musicians

As a charity, it is vitally important we spend our funds in the way that our supporters have trusted us to use them. Our charitable purpose is to prevent hardship amongst professional and retired professional

musicians – this means those who are making a living from music, and within our published eligibility criteria we outline how we currently define that based on data.

Every year, like all charities, we have an independent audit to make sure we are using our charitable funds properly and can prove this. Therefore, while we try to make applying for our support as easy as possible, we do need to collect enough evidence to feel confident we can show we are only supporting musicians who fit our charitable purpose.

We only assess your eligibility at the time of application. We know musicians’ income goes up and down throughout their career. Therefore, if your circumstances around your music work change in future, you can apply at that time.

To ensure we can support as many musicians as possible, providing them with the best service, we limit the number of appeals we can consider from each applicant. We ask that you only appeal an eligibility decision once in a 12-month period.

If you make repeat appeals about eligibility within a year, we reserve the right to respectfully decline to process your appeal. However, we consider each situation independently and our priority is always to ensure musicians feel respected and supported by us.